My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and all who came before me, stretching back to Adam (or Lucy, if you prefer), are gone now.

This new status doesn’t make me feel like an orphan. My stepmother, who has been my mother for 47 years, comes from hardy stock and may outlive me. And I have an aunt who’s only a half-generation older than me who will be around for a long time to come.

And it's not as if facing the prospect of becoming part of the oldest generation has made me feel elderly — yet. I’m only 56. But the significance of my dad's death is already making me look at the past differently.

I’ve always been the unofficial memory-keeper in my family. But even I, the supposed expert and stickler for details, know little about our roots.

When I was born, nine of my forebears were still alive. But while they were here, I didn’t spend enough time talking to them about their pasts. Now it’s too late. Few of them bothered to write down even a brief autobiography and nobody kept a journal.

Somehow, there are all kinds of impediments to passing down family history and lore. You'd think it would be such a simple task and that there would be plenty of time in everyone's life to do it.

When I moved to Chico, I was curious about what it was like for my dad’s family to have lived here for a few months in the late 1920s.

My dad was born in Chico. He was the first member of his family to have been born in California. But, of course, he couldn’t tell me anything. He was still a baby when he, his parents and five brothers and sisters left Chico. My dad’s oldest brother was 10 when the family came here. But he’s no help because he’s not interested in thinking about the past. A lot of people are like that.

My dad and I tried to find a landmark that would attest to our family’s stay in Chico. My dad’s birth certificate gave a home address. We found the spot, not far from First Avenue and The Esplanade, but the house looked too new to have been around in 1927. The Polk Directory showed no occupant by the name of Brown living at that address in either 1927 or 1928.

My dad was the only one of his siblings to have been born in a hospital. So I showed him the building on Flume Street that once housed Enloe Hospital, not knowing if there were other hospitals in Chico at the time. Just six weeks later the old hospital building burned down. So much for landmarks.

I often think about what it would have been like if my dad and his family had stayed in Chico. I’d be able to claim old-timer status.

But we’re not that kind of family. We don’t stay in one place. I’ve been in Chico 10 years, and that seems like a long time. When Chico didn’t work out for my dad’s family, they moved to the Bay Area. When I was growing up, most of my relatives lived there. But in the last 40 years just about all of us have migrated to more rural parts of the state.

We are a rootless family, and we leave few behind traces of our existence. What is known about our lives rarely outlives us. The family narrative is too fragmented to offer any clues about how our background might have shaped us. And every time a person dies without having said much about what they did and why they did it, we become even more cut off from our past.

Car traffic is light, but a suprising number of people pass by on foot and on bicycles. It’s a part of Chico where the pace of life seems slower than the city as a whole. Yet the coffeehouse attracts a steady stream of customers.

Has Beans itself is tiny. It has just two inside tables. But customers can sit at two umbrella-covered tables facing the street and watch the world amble by or they can sit in a shaded patio to the side of the building.

I wish more of Chico’s neighborhoods had their own coffeehouse. Higher Ground in Longfellow Terrace and Cafe Paolo at Fifth and Ivy streets come closest to what Has Beans Creekside offers.

It appears that coffeehouses downtown and along major thoroughfares are struggling. I noticed that the Hideaway Cafe in the Phoenix Building is no more. I was there just a few days before it closed.

As a flaneur in good standing, I seldom drive to Has Beens Creekside Cafe. I leave my car at Bidwell Park and then walk a loop that includes a stop at Has Beans. You can see some of Chico’s most sumptuous and most modest houses along this route.

If you go to Has Beans Creekside on the weekends, you can listen to live music on the patio. I’ve already heard a folk, rock, jazz group called Wounded Pick-up and a Latin and classic jazz group called Indoor Barbecue perform.
If you like laid-back leisure time, nothing can be better than sipping an iced latte on the patio on a Sunday morning, tapping your feet to the music and trying to remember the words to “The Girl from Ipanema.”

I decided that I would eventually drive every road between Sacramento and Redding. It’s turning out to be more of an adventure than I thought. The valley has lots of roads that start out paved and then suddenly become gravel or dirt. I do my best to keep going, provided that the road doesn’t peter out.

I have my favorite country roads: the Midway between Chico and Durham, of course; Chico River Road west of Chico; Highway 45 between Ord Bend and Colusa, which is the route I take whenever I travel to the Bay Area.

But I also have out-of-the-way favorites — roads taken only for the pleasure of driving them. I’ve seen all of Highway 99, and the stretch between Los Molinos and Red Bluff is the most scenic. It’s filled with roadside stands that sell produce and other items.

I also like the roads west of Highway 99 between Gridley and Yuba City. If you take Larkin Road, you’ll see an Islamic center and a Skikh temple within just a few miles of each other. They’re so unexpected in this land of prune orchards that they almost seem like a mirage.

Bear River Road, between East Nicolaus and Wheatland, is one of the most surprising of the scenic byways. I don’t like this part of the valley. For one thing, it’s too wide and monotonous. For another thing, it’s becoming littered with commuter suburbs. But this twsty road through walnut orchards seems far removed from all that. The housing bust and the gas price surge may conspire for a while to keep this area safe from the bulldozer.

With gas prices approaching $4.50 a gallon, Sacramento Valley country roads become all the more appealing. It’s getting too expensive to travel much farther than that.

I took this photo standing inside the new transit center at the southwest corner of Second and Salem streets. It’s sleek, stark and shiny, but I like the way its solar-paneled roofline frames Madison Bear Garden.

The transit center could have been designed to be quaint to make it fit its surroundings. But that would have been too predictable. This 21st century look dropped into a much older cityscape is refreshing.

I suppose I would have felt differently if a four-story structure in the style of the transit center had been put up.
So here, at last, is the successor to Hotel Oaks, which stood at this corner for almost 50 years, followed by 40 years as a parking lot. The hotel was a hub of Chico. Now, in a different way, the transit center also serves as a hub.

I would have preferred that the hotel were still standing. But it was our tastes that doomed it. We stopped patronizing downtown hotels in smaller cities that don’t cater to tourists. All eyes are on the recently-restored Hotel Diamond to see if it signals a resurgence in travelers’ preference for hotels over motels or bed and breakfasts when they come looking for a place to sleep in Chico.

Chico’s first cooke-cutter houses were built more than 100 years ago.

How can that be? Those were the good old days, right? Each house was different from its neighbor, wasn’t it?

The problem is that we are quick to use the term “cookie-cutter” in a pejorative way. We think of it as a post-World War II malady. If housing is mass-produced, then it must be mediocre, right? It must be ugly and charmless.

Well, take a look at these three identical houses on Third Street, just east of Flume Street. Cute, aren’t they?

They were built in 1902 as rentals, at what was once the east end of town. It’s just outside the original grid of streets John Bidwell laid out almost 150 years ago. Today, their location places them inside the city’s historical core. They are still used as rentals.They look a little worse for wear, but I bet they’ll be around for a long time to come.

There are four or five other sets of these cookie-cutter houses scattered throughout downtown Chico. Just a half block away on Flume, next to the vacant lot that was once Enloe Hospital, is a set of two look-alike houses.

In our rosy view of the past, we like to imagine everyone owning their own house. But renting was far more common than it is now. People in small towns rented little houses like these, rooms in other people’s houses, hotel rooms or apartments in bungalow courts, or they took up residence in garages, barns and other outbuildings.

The first apartment buildings in Chico began popping up in the early 20th century. A good Chico example is the Waterland Apartments, on Normal Avenue between Third and Fourth streets. The building itself has been around since the 1880s, but it was converted into apartments back in 1914.

In Chico, at least, there’s a lot more to older neighborhoods than grand corner domiciles, such as the Stansbury, Earll, Walker and Barnard houses. Surviving structures show that people of modest means lived here, too.

The designers of the almost-completed Student Services Center, at the northeast corner of Warner and Second streets, have gone the extra mile to give the campus a building that is respectful to the qualities that make Trinity and Kendall halls, Laxson Auditorium and a couple of other buildings so memorable.

About a week ago, I went on a tour of the historical core of the campus organized by the university’s public affairs office in observance of the completion of Trinity Hall 75 years ago.

The tour concluded on the east side of the Student Services Center, where two of its architects, David Israel and Mark Kelly, from the San Francisco firm Bar Architects, talked about their efforts to design a building that has some of the qualities of the older campus structures.

They said the use of bricks, tall windows with lintels over them and extended moldings with brackets at the roofline give the building a sense of massiveness and gravity. Israel said the shape of the east side of the building creates a courtyard. “We wanted it to resemble a cloister.”

The building is across the walkway (formerly First Street) from Meriam Library, one of Chico State’s most aggressively modernist buildings. I talked to Kelly about the contrast between it and his new building. He said although he’s not an architectural historian, the library is a good example of the “brutalist” style that was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. He said these buildings were prized for their functionality and distinctiveness; they didn’t attempt to fit in with their surroundings.

He said nowadays clients want buildings that have a more human face.

I watched this building take shape. It wasn’t until the final stages of construction that its face came into focus. I appreciate the use of columns in this building, which take their cue from the porches of Kendall Hall and Laxson Auditorium.

The Student Services building doesn’t mark a return to the Chico State’s 1930s masterpieces. I’m sure the cost of recreating such structures would be prohibitive today. But maybe it will set a trend. Most of the buildings that have gone up in the last 60 years have disfigured the campus.

It’s interesting to speculate about what Chico’s founding mother would think, say and do 90 years after her death. (She died March 9, 1918). One of the ways I explored this in my column was to assume she didn’t die and, at 168, is now the oldest person who ever lived. I took kind of a SciFi approach. But it would have been nice if she had lived just a little longer. I think if today’s medical treatments had been available to her, she could have lived well into her 80s.

It’s possible that the treatments she received in her old age may have hastened her death. The late Lois McDonald alluded to some of them in her biography of Bidwell. For example, she was prescribed medicines that contained arsenic and cocaine. Physical therapies she was subjected to included jolts of electricity to her body and the breaking of ligaments in her shoulder to correct a “constriction” problem. It’s the old story of the “cures” being worse than the ailments.

If she had lived just one more year, she would have been pleased at the ratification of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacturing, importing and exporting of alcoholic beverages. Throughout her life, she was an ardent Prohibitionist.

If she had lived just two more years, she would have applauded the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Woman’s suffrage was another of her causes —a progressive one, in this case.
If she had lived into the 1920s, she would have seen drastic changes in women’s fashions — not just the tossing of the corset, but the coming of short hair and knee-length dresses.

She would have observed that female students at Chico State College were starting to live on their own, unchaperoned. She wouldn’t have failed to notice that grown women were now pursuing careers and defining themselves as more than just wives, mothers and community volunteers.

What would she have thought of all this? Would she have said “All we wanted was the vote. What did we unleash?” Or would she have concluded that it was high time for these other changes to occur?

There would have been a lot of technological changes in the 1920s for her to react to. This was the decade that the last of Chico’s streets were paved and cars replaced horses and carriages as the main way to get around. Would Bidwell have learned how to drive? Would she have owned several cars?

Would she have been among the first commercial airline passengers? When she was first married, the coming of the transcontinental railroad made it possible for her to reach her family in Washington, D.C. in a week’s time. How would she have felt if she knew she could cross the country in a matter of hours?

Bidwell would have found herself living in interesting times if she had managed to stay around another decade.

Chico offers innumerable dining choices at reasonable prices. Even the high-end places aren’t that expensive. You could go out for three meals a day for three months without exhausting the choices and without doing serious damage to your wallet.

The city’s ethnic offerings continue to expand. Two years ago, there were no Indian restaurants. Today there are three. So far we have no Eritrean restaurants, but I’m sure that will change before long.

So what are the best places in Chico to eat? In general, the food is so good that few establishments rise above the others. But here are my picks. Bustolini’s has the best sandwiches, mainly because of its selection of Italian deli meats. The Rice Bowl has the best Chinese food, with each mouthful offering subtle, varied flavors. In-N-Out has the best fast food hamburgers. Chili’s is the best chain. Spice Creek has the most imaginatively prepared and intense-tasting dinners.

Casa Ramos is my favorite Mexican restaurant, but I have to admit I latched on to it soon after I moved here and haven’t explored other places.

We don’t go out to Italian restaurants. My wife is content to prepare those kinds of meals at home. We don’t go to heavy-duty carnivore places. I love meat, but I went to so many steakhouses when I was growing up that I got tired of them.

Breakfast is difficult to do badly, but I will single out Jedidiah’s for its outstanding Eggs Benedict. It’s the Hollandaise sauce that makes or breaks this dish.

What Chico needs is a dessert and coffee house offering table service and live music that opens its doors at about 8 p.m. and doesn’t close until the wee hours of the morning — a place to go after dinner and a concert or theater performance.

What I’d love to see is in this town is just one eating place where nobody would be allowed to talk above a whisper. There’s far too much “din” in “dinner” these days.

Oroville's Chinese temple burned down twice before brick replaced wood as the main building material. The third time was the charm. The current temple has stood since 1863, although floods played havoc with it until a levee was built along the Feather River.

In Chico, the brick building at the southwest corner of of Eighth Street and Broadway (first photo) has stood since 1874, although the west end was added later. The building was part of a section of downtown Chico known as The Junction. Over the years it has been used as a brewery, hotel, saloon, restaurant, antique store, bicycle shop and deli.

Despite their relative durability, bricks were rarely used to build Chico houses. The few brick residences include the Bidwell Mansion, the Lusk house (now Madison Bear Garden) and the Walker house (second photo), at the northwest corner of Ivy and Third streets. It was built in 1875 by Jefferson Walker, who owned a brick yard. Walker's company also built the Phoenix building and the old Chico High School.

After the 19th century, brick became more a decorative than a structural element in Chico buildings. The fireplace chimneys of many of the city’s craftsman bungalows are accented with clinker bricks, which get their name from their tendency to become discolored when they are placed too close to the fire in a kiln. They are usually discarded, but in the early 20th century they became popular with architects associated with the arts and crafts movement.

Brick is a common design element of Chico State University's buildings. Even the ugliest buildings on campus, such as the Meriam Library (third photo), make use of it.

A newer building that puts brick work to good use is the Tri-Counties Bank at the southeast corner of Salem and Fifth streets (fourth photo). The building is the former Sequoia Hotel.

Most brick walls are built in a running bond pattern, which consists entirely of stretchers (bricks placed lengthwise). In a running bond, the placement of the bricks alternates from row to row. Other patterns combine stretchers and headers (bricks placed so that the short side faces out).

Chico is lucky to have so many structures that are at least a century old. But some of them get overlooked. I had no idea this building was that old.

The “then” photo was brought in several months ago by Ted De Bernardi. I wasn’t in, so he placed it on my desk, along with some notes. I decided to wait to run it until the building reached the century mark. The man in the photo is De Bernardi’s grandfather, Warren B. Todd, who is shown working on the building in 1908. De Bernardi writes that his grandfather operated a grocery store at this site until he died in 1933.

The next business was the Hacienda, a Mexican restaurant, which later moved to The Esplanade. It then became a pizza parlor and it’s now a Thai restaurant.

The only reason I recognized the building from De Bernardi’s photo is that when I came to Chico 10 years ago, it was painted a gaudy color. It was hard to miss. Today, it’s a bluish gray and harder to spot.

It won’t be long before Chico has entire neighborhoods that are 100 years old. The avenues, Mansion Park, the Barber neighorhood and the west side all got their start in the first decade of the 20th century. They were pretty much built out by the 1930s.

The area between Bidwell Park, the freeway, Eighth Street and downtown has survived almost intact. Most of the houses there are at least 70 years old. Downtown and the South Campus neighborhood still have a smattering of 19th century buildings.

California’s perennial newness gets old fast. Most of the state’s cities look like perpetual construction sites. Chico’s core provides an antidote to that. I shudder to think what would happen to the quality of life in Chico if its center ceased to hold.

From this vantage point, the orchards seem to go on forever in every direction. On clear days, you can see snow-capped mountains east and west of the valley. This is the picture postcard version of California.

I don’t advise stopping on the overpass to look at the orchards. The road is too narrow to safely pull over. Park your car on the side of a nearby road and walk along the overpass. Take lots of photos.

It’s become almost an annual tradition for me to write about why I’m so attached to blooming orchards. I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley. In 1958, when I was 6, prune orchards stretched all the way from the edge of our back yard to Campbell, the nearest town.

When I was 12, we moved out of the valley. By that time, there was nothing but houses stretching from the edge of our back yard to Campbell. The change from rural to suburban sprawl happened quickly. I mourn the loss of such a familiar landscape, which was so memorable in the spring.

The 1960s gave rise to at least two pop songs about people who cherished the small towns where they were raised. They had to move to big cities when they grew up, but they always longed to get back to their hometowns. But when they do return, they find everything has been paved over. “I looked for the meadows, there wasn’t a trace, six lanes of highway had taken their place,” Verdelle Smith sings in “Tar and Cement.”

“There’s a drag strip down by the riverside where my grandma’s cow used to graze. Now the grass don’t grow and the river don’t flow like it did in my childhood days,” Joe South sings in “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home.”

People who grew up in Chico and then head off to the big city often feel nostalgic for the place they knew when it was a small town. It’s hard to say what they make of their hometown now that it has grown to the size of a small city. But at least the orchards are still here. I’d like to believe there’s some consolation in that.

There isn’t much that appeals to families, which seems strange when you consider that the charm of downtown is supposed to be based on a wholesome, small-town atmosphere. So I was pleased when Old Town Rootbeer opened a couple of years ago and Powell’s Sweet Shoppe made its debut last year. They inject an element of kid-friendliness that had been missing. They are kin to Shubert’s Ice Cream and Candy, a downtown staple.

It’s a shame there are no longer any move theaters downtown. They have disappeared over the last 10 years. They offered family-oriented activites. I’m not forgetting The Pageant, but it offers mainly grownup fare.

I’m not trumpeting the virtues of families over other demographic groups per se. Families are well-represented in suburban parts of Chico, but they are in short supply downtown, which ought to be a place that feels comfortable to everyone.

The success of City Plaza depends on the willingness to Chicoans think of it as their front yard, just as they have laid claim to Bidwell Park as their back yard. The more downtown businesses that appeal to every age group, the better the mix of people using the plaza.

The block directly to the north has three.

Start this walk around the block on the northwest corner of Broadway and Fourth Street in front of the Morehead building, named after a longtime farming family. It has been around since 1901, but has been remodeled twice. In the 1940s, the original facade, which had windows and a cupola, was modernized. In the 1990s, when modern was no longer the preferred look for old buildings, the effect was softened.

Wayne Cook, who owns the building, told me a couple of years ago that he plans to restore it to its original look.

Head west on Fourth. The next building on your right is the Hotel Diamond, which Wayne Cook also owns and has already restored. It has a hotel and restaurant.

It dates from about 1904. For years it was knwon as Traveler's Hotel, In the early 1960s, it was a Chico State University women’s residence, called Morehead Hall. Delancy Restaurant, which closed in 1983, was the last tenant until Cook began his work. The building stood empty for more than 20 years and became one of downtown’s eyesores. Today it is a showplace.

Turn right on Diamond Alley. As you head north, admire the bay windows on Hotel Diamond and imagine how they looked (and may again look) on the Morehead building.

When you reach Third Street, you will be at the northwest corner of what is now known as the Phoenix Building. Built by Jerry Noonan in 1889, it was gutted by a fire in 1975, a fate that has befallen so many downtown Chico buildings. At that time it was called Toad Hall. The latest name alludes to its resurrection after the fire.

When it was rebuilt, it was turned into a mini-mall. Most of the original brick walls remain. The building is owned by the Morehead family.

The Phoenix building has been one of Chico’s principal downtown commercial buildings for almost 120 years.

The Bank of America building, on the southwest corner of Broadway and Fourth Street, is the site of Nichols Hardware, a landmark business that burned down in 1950. Decades ago, Bank of America occupied the vacant building that most recently was the home of Chevy’s Restaurant.

I suppose it’s an exaggeration to call the current Bank of America building ridiculous, but it’s far from sublime. Its neighbor to the south, the Silberstein Park building, comes close to being that, however. One of the best things about the building, which will turn 100 next year, is that it looks good from both the front and back, as you can see by the photos.

Although it was designed to be an office building, Silberstein Park spent most of its life as the La Grande Hotel. At one time, a movie theater, called The Lyric, occupied the ground floor.

The hotel closed in 1982. Local developers Bob Fortino and Bud Tracy refurbished the building in 1984.

Next door to the Park Silberstein is Taco Bell. It vies with Jack in the Box across the street and the 7-11 at First and Main streets for the distinction of being the most inappropriate building in downtown Chico. Taco Bell’s predecessor, a building that stood for 50 years and housed such businesses as Hannah’s Grocery and Betty’s Dress Shop, was torn down in 1966.

Turn right on Fifth Street. All that’s left of this block is the Bank of America parking lot. But here I pay homage to the Italianate style Crew Canfield house, which stood at the northeast corner of Fifth and Salem streets from 1883 until it was torn down in 1966 to make was for the expansion of the bank’s parking lot.

It was built by Alexander Crew, who established one of Chico’s first banks in 1872.

I haven’t lost hope for this block. One day, the Bank of America and Taco Bell buildings may be torn down and be replaced by successors that are more worthy of this setting. But I’m sure the parking lot wil be with us forever.

Did John and Annie Bidwell have sex?

Why would we assume they didn’t? Well, for one thing, they didn’t have chidren. And then there’s the fact that they were Victorians, who have a reputation for being uptight. Furthermore, Annie was very religious, and made sure John was as well. But does this mean they weren’t physically intimate?

This is one of the delicate topics the late Lois McDonald raised in her biography of Annie Bidwell. McDonald is convinced that John Bidwell fathered children with Indian women before he married Annie. And she doesn’t doubt for a minute that the Bidwells had sex after they were married. She even has a snippet of erotic writing to prove it.

We’ll get to that soon. But first let’s think about the Victorian era. People may have been prudish about sex, but that just means they didn’t talk about it. Back then, one of the main purposes for marriage was to have children. And in those days, you still had to have sex in order to procreate.

Britain’s Queen Victoria, for whom the era was named, had nine children in the first 18 years of marriage to Prince Albert. Then he died.

Although the Bidwells had no children, it wasn’t by choice. So you can be sure they tried.

McDonald speculates in her book that the reason Annie became violently ill early in their marriage was because she suffered a miscarriage. Then she spent a couple of weeks confined to her bed, presumably to recover.

Her bed, by the way, was their bed. Unlike a lot of wealthy Victorians, the Bidwells shared a bedroom — except whenever one of them was out of town, which happened a lot. Early in their marriage, Annie spent months at a time visiting her family in Washington, D.C. And John was often away on business trips.

Their letters — which they wrote to each other every day whenever they were parted — often express an intense longing.

In one exchange McDonald included in her book, John wrote, “While I was in Dr. Harkness’ waiting room, a man said that the juice of the pomegranate afforded great wonders in the night.”

Annie later replied, “Oh, how I long for some of your pomegranate juice — more than any other fruit.”

That’s pretty racy stuff for a couple of Victorians.